On the 14th February 1997, Carey left her Marketing Manager role at AXA New Zealand and set up the financial planning business that become Moneyworks NZ Ltd. At the same time, she moved to live with Peter in Turangi, changed her last name (from her maiden name of Hughes), and called the business Church Financial Services Ltd (which seemed logical at the time!).
Logos development over time:
The business was started from scratch with no clients and with a goal to provide a full service, holistic financial planning service to people aged between 35 and 55. This included looking at the peoples goals and objectives, insurances, and investments. At this time, a large number of people that we talked to had high fee low returning superannuation plans or Whole of Life policies. From day one, our recommendations were for low fee unit trusts, and we recommended life insurance, trauma insurance and income protection insurance to clients.
Church Financial Services chose two main providers after extensive analysis - AXA New Zealand (which had just been renamed from National Mutual Life) and Armstrong Jones for investments. We were able to use other providers, but we believed that these were the most suitable solutions for the clients that were working with.
Carey worked alone in the business for 18 months, then appointed a part time assistant - Vicky. From 1999 to the end of 2003. the business expanded rapidly and at the peak there were 19 people working in the business (9 advisers. Carey and Peter, and 8 support staff based in Turangi), Peter joined full time in mid 2002.
With the name change to Moneyworks (after we discovered that people thought we represented a religious organisation), we consolidated our education offer, providing education seminars to employers, for their employees. These started in 1999 and have been mainly provided to government and semi government organisations including, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Ministry of Justice, Land Information New Zealand, AgResearch, Geological and Nuclear Sciences, Transpower, Waikato District Health Board. In all, we have provided our core 'How to Make Your Money Work' seminar to over 75 different corporates.
At the end of 2003, we realised that our core vision wasn't being fulfilled with the large number of people working with us, and by the time that KiwiSaver was about to be launched at the end of 2006, we ended up with a core team of four people (Carey, Peter and two client service managers.) With the launch of KiwiSaver, the white paper that we wrote had more than 1000 downloads from (mainly) employers, and Peter and Carey presented over 500 KiwiSaver seminars in the second half of 2007.
At our 20th Anniversary, we have a core team of three advisers, Carey, Peter and Paul, who are all AFA's (Authorised Financial Advisers), and our two Client Service Managers, Karol and Mereana - who have been working with us for 12 and 10 years respectively. We have a virtual office, have 154 full service Membership Fee clients, and over 2500 KiwiSaver clients.
With the relocation of Carey and Peter to Cambridge, clients can now visit us in our home office, and Paul is travelling almost weekly to work in Cambridge (from his Auckland base). During 2017. we are partnering with the Cambridge News to provide an education platform for people in the Cambridge area, through a fortnightly column, highlighting financial planning issues that may be relevant to them.
We look forward to continuing to work with you - or starting to work with you if this is something that you have been thinking about for some time, and you are now ready.
Thanks for all your support over the years that we have known you.
